On 18/12/2012 22:50, Ben Campbell wrote:
I think Nick's email was a review of the document in general,
yes, sorry, it was. I hit reply when I saw the subject line.
I don't think so. This draft does not establish a standard, or define a
protocol. While I don't speak for the authors, I don't think it's
intended to make normative statements about anything. The language is
descriptive, not prescriptive.
ok, noted.
(I agree "has to" is an awkward substitute for the non-normative "must".
I agree that "must" should generally be avoided when there can be
confusion about the normativeness of a statement. I'm not sure that's
the case here, since the whole doc is non-normative. And I think we
could find better language even when the confusion is possible.)
"needs to"? "ought to"? It's all massively context dependent though.
What's needed are some words / phrases which are defined to have local
imperative scope only or else nonlocal informative "must" - but yeah it's
messy and generally will involve nontrivial wordsmithing to work around
what is meant.
Nick